Peso Pluma: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot

Peso Pluma arrives slightly early to his own birthday party. He’s dressed in Dior from head to toe, but still looks casual in a long-sleeve button-down overshirt stamped with the designer’s oblique logo, dark jeans and black sneakers with white shoelaces. The famously punctual birthday boy, who’s turning 24 today (June 15), tours the venue — a gorgeous hidden garden just south of Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico, that’s overflowing with trees and sparkly chandeliers — to ensure his vision for the party has been executed. Amid the greenery is a makeshift club with a stage, a dancefloor surrounded by tables and couches, and a huge light-up bar that’s impossible to miss. Pretty much what one would expect a 20-something’s birthday party vibe to be like.

But his childhood dreams have also come to life here. Branching off the club area, there’s a sweets room with all sorts of Mexican candy and, separately, another room for all things savory, with countless bags of chips — from Takis to Ruffles to Tostitos — and an array of toppings like melted cheddar cheese, chile piquín, lime and corn. Piñatas, including one of Peso himself and another of Spider-Man (a childhood favorite), hang from the ceilings, and Peso flashes a pearly white, almost mischievous ear-to-ear smile when he sees them. “It’s exactly how I envisioned it,” he says with satisfaction.

He could say the same of his now globe-spanning career. The artist born Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija is at the forefront of Mexican music, leading the genre’s seismic growth in the United States and beyond with his signature corridos tumbados — a variety of the corrido (storytelling ballad) that often flaunts a chill yet lavish, weed-centric lifestyle. Raw, nasally and raspy, Peso’s distinctive vocals punctuate a sound powered by a requinto acoustic guitar, tololoche (a stringed bass instrument), charcheta (an alto horn) and trombone. And he remains a creative chameleon: Outside of corridos, he has recorded heartbreak and ultra-romantic songs, too.